As the laps wound down in Sunday’s XFINITY 500 at Martinsville Speedway, cameras focused on race leader Ryan Blaney and post-season drivers William Byron and Christopher Bell as they battled to determine which would land a place in Championship 4.

Byron and Bell were the main characters in this story and spent the final 15 rounds of Sunday’s event separated by a single point. However, there are certainly some background characters that haven’t gone completely unnoticed.

Whether intentional or not, Bubba Wallace (No. 23), Austin Dillon (No. 3) and Ross Chastain (No. 1) all played a role in the outcome of the event.

Wallace drives a Toyota-backed car for 23XI Racing, which has a relationship with Joe Gibbs Racing – the team that fields Christopher Bell’s No. 20. Meanwhile, Dillon and Chastain drive for Chevrolet-backed organizations Richard Childress Racing and Trackhouse Racing.

Elton Sawyer, NASCAR’s senior vice president of competition, said in a post-race news conference that the sanctioning body would review the late-race actions at Martinsville and decide whether additional sanctions were necessary. .

“Yes, we’ll look into everything,” Sawyer said. “As I said earlier, we want to go back, like we would have done anyway. We’ll go back, we’ll take all the data, the video. We’ll listen to the car audio. We’ll do everything this, as we would do for any event.

However, according to Sawyer, the 27-minute deliberation following the checkered flag was aimed exclusively at deciding whether or not Bell would be penalized for riding the outside wall, a penalty option that became available after Ross Chastain’s “Hail Melon” at the fall 2022.

So, what exactly happened to make everyone so suspicious of the three non-playoff drivers?

In the closing stages of Sunday’s event, William Byron was fading, as his No. 24 Liberty University Chevrolet was damaged in an earlier incident with Blaney and Shane Van Gisbergen that slightly tore off his toe and killed any speed in the long run.

With 15 laps to go, Byron fell to sixth. With Bell 18th and not on the first lap, the gap was reduced to just one point between them. Austin Dillon and Ross Chastain were seventh and eighth when the pass was made and parked their Chevrolet Camaros behind the No. 24, double-wide to prevent any progress.

Byron finished sixth, followed by Dillon and Chastain. However, it was clear that the No. 24 was holding the pack, as Brad Keselowski, Joey Logano, Noah Gragson, Shane Van Gisbergen and Alex Bowman all closed up to the back of the battle.

During the same period, there was nearly five minutes of “abnormal radio communication” which occurred between Austin Dillon, crew chief Justin Alexander and observer Brandon Benesch, where all three parties can be heard discussing the state of the No. 24’s post-season race, as well as “of the plan”, asking if Ross Chastain and crew chief Phil Surgen knew about said plan.

“If we pass him, he will be eliminated,” a crew member of the No. 3 Chevrolet said on the radio in the final laps of the race. At this point, Dillon returns and asks his crew who Byron is racing with. “Keep me posted on this matter, Justin (Alexander), if it changes,” said another crew member, presumed to be the observer.

As for the No. 1 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet, radio communications between Ross Chastain, crew chief Phil Surgen and observer Brandon McReynolds indicate no foul play. The team’s only real suspicion comes from being involved in Team #3’s communications, when they ask them if they (Chastain and Surgen) know about the plan.

With a watchful eye on Byron and the Talladega-sized field chasing him, at the other end of the track, Bubba Wallace was struggling in his No. 23 Toyota Camry in one turn. down and just one place ahead of Christopher Bell.

The radio communications between Wallace, crew chief Bootie Barker and observer Freddie Kraft are not as blatant as those of the Richard Childress Racing team, but what happens in the final rounds of the event is probably open to interpretation.

Wallace can be heard on the radio saying, “God forbid if we don’t help a damn (Joe Gibbs Racing) car,” but the driver of the No. 23 is right behind Martin Truex, Jr., and a few laps later is passed by his team owner Denny Hamlin.

Despite his crew telling him to “fight the 24 (Byron) with everything you’ve got” as he approaches behind him. At this point in the race, Wallace is still one spot ahead of Bell, and the gap between the No. 24 and No. 20 teams is only a single point.

With three laps to go, Wallace touched the radio and said, “I think I have a tire going.” At that moment, the on-board camera shows the No. 23 very wobbly in the turns, as if a tire was actually puncturing, while it was driving in the second, and sometimes even the third, lane.

The 23XI Racing driver’s pace slowed significantly over the final three laps of the race, losing a second or more from the pace he set moments earlier. Wallace continued to lose time and, on the final lap, was overtaken by the giant swarm of racing cars, including Christopher Bell.

On the final lap of the race, Wallace let the field of cars pass on the inside when the Joe Gibbs Racing driver rushed into Turn 3, hitting the side of the No. 23 Toyota Camry XSE, sending both cars on the track, and Bell into the outside wall – where he decides to step on the gas pedal and ride the wall.

Afterwards, the crew asks Wallace if he needs a fire extinguisher to put out a fire – Tyler Reddick, his teammate at 23XI Racing, had a fire under the hood of the race car that eventually took him out prematurely from the race.

Regardless of how you feel about the actions of these three drivers, they had an impact on the outcome of the event and the championship, which saw Byron retain sixth place and qualify for Championship 4, after Christopher Bell received a safety penalty for rolling. the wall.

In the coming days, NASCAR will investigate radio communications, SMT data, on-board cameras and any information they can obtain, and decide whether or not the sanctioning body should impose sanctions for race manipulation – sanctions that can be tough.